Fleetingness and Flâneurie: Leopardi, Baudelaire and the Experience of

Transience.

La soif insatiable de tout ce qui est au delà, et qui révèle la vie, est la preuve

la plus vivante de notre immortalité. C’est à la fois par la poésie et à travers

la poésie, par et à travers la musique que l’âme entrevoit les splendeurs

situées derrière le tombeau; et quand un poème exquis amène les larmes au

bord des yeux, ces larmes ne sont pas la preuve d’un excès de jouissance,

elles sont bien plutôt le témoignage d’une mélancolie irritée, d’une

postulation des nerfs, d’une nature exilée dans l’imparfait et qui voudrait

s’emparer immédiatement, sur cette terre même, d’un paradis révélé.

Baudelaire, Notes Nouvelles sur Edgar Poe (1857)

La funzione del poeta sarebbe quella di non aver funzione, ossia di non

adeguarsi ad un sistema che funziona, con le sue pale e ingranaggi.

Marco Lucchesi, interview

[http://musibrasil.net/articolo.php?id=199, retrieved 25/11/2010]

In his 1757 Essai sur le goût, Montesquieu notes: that our notion of pleasure is a cultural matter

([les] plaisirs […] sont fondés sur les plis et les préjugés que de certaines institutions, de certains

usages, de certaines habitudes lui [à notre âme] ont fait prendre”, Montesquieu 1823:160) and that

surprise is a determining factor in the elicitation of pleasure: “[la surprise] […] plaît à l’âme par le

spectacle et par la promptitude de l’action; car elle aperçoit ou sent une chose qu’elle n’attend pas,

ou d’une manière qu’elle n’attendoit pas” (179).1 Both points are intimately linked with time-bound

experiences: the temporary duration and therefore changeability of customs, and the sudden, instant

and swift experience of shock.

In the introductory remarks of Friedrich Schlegel’s On the Study of Greek Poetry, written

about 40 years later, the issue of the temporary nature of aesthetic values resurfaces, both in the

sense of their transitory quality and the shock of the new. Schlegel laments the lack of “harmony”,

“completion” and “whole[ness]” in modern poetry: due to a succession of transient, and therefore

failing, aesthetic experiences:

Public taste […] or, rather, the caricature of public taste, fashion [original italics], pays homage with

every passing moment to a new false idol. Each new splendid appearance inspires the confident belief

that now the goal – ultimate beauty – has been attained and that, accordingly, the fundamental law of

taste, the ultimate measure of all works of art has been found. All so that the next moment can put an

1 Unless otherwise stated, all italics in the quotations are mine.

end to the giddiness, so that those who have come to their sense can destroy the image of the mortal

idol, and in a new affected intoxication enshrine another in its place whose divinity will not last

longer than the mood of its own worshipers! (Schlegel 2001:19)

The mutability of customs, the shock of surprise, and fashion are concepts dependent upon

each other. The existence of fashion (even in art) is indeed ensured by the constant mutability of

public taste deriving from, first, the emergence of, and, then, the habituation to, surprises in the

form of commodities, and of new material or intellectual objects. Once surprise has settled into

habituation, a new shock is needed to start the process all over again. As Patriarca notes (2008:58)

were fashion to reach its goal, and succeed in uniformising collective taste, it would kill its own

principle: self-perpetuation through the shock of new distractions, whose adoption becomes, at the

same time, a mark of social distinction. Significantly Balzac in his Traité de la vie elegante, and

Leopardi in the Discorso sullo stato presente dei costumi degli italiani both note that fashion is a

privilege of those who do not have to work to earn a living, namely the nobles and rich.

The aim of this contribution is to analyse the centrality of the experience of transience in

modern culture (of which fashion has become the quintessence) as it emerges from Leopardi’s

planned journal Spettatore fiorentino, and Baudelaire’s essays on Poe, and the Peintre de la vie

moderne. These texts incorporate the sense of the fragmentedness of existence, memory as a

prosthesis of the self, and a piece of relic or a ruin (resulting from the repetition of death associated

with life experiences), art as fashion, and fashion as death in life.

German Romanticism both sealed the notion of aesthetic relativism and acknowledged the domain

of subjectivity in art. Despite Leopardi’s scant knowledge of German authors, of Schlegel and

Schiller among others, he held similar views on the relative and subjective nature of art (above all

in the Zibaldone, and, of the many examples elsewhere, suffice it to quote the third chapter of Il

Parini, ovvero della gloria).2 While Leopardi’s views converged on many points with a relative and

subjective conception of art, it was his full emancipation from the notion that the aim of art should

go beyond the strictly aesthetic that placed him on the threshold of modernity. As highlighted by

Claudio Colaiacomo (in Rafele 2010:4), this threshold, characterised by the complete theoretical

interiorization of the notion of mutability, will be codified later by Charles Baudelaire.

The idea of the journal Spettatore fiorentino originated from the financial constraints in

which Leopardi found himself in 1831, on the expiry of the one-year subvention offered to him by

his Florentine friends in 1830. By then, Leopardi, who had decided to throw in his lot with that of

the young Neapolitan patriot Antonio Ranieri, found himself pressurised by the need to obtain a 2 For the relationship between Leopardi and Schlegel, see in particolar Musarra (2000).

regular income. In choosing to launch a journal, Leopardi gives the appearance of trying his hand

with a booming and fashionable genre. Yet his preamble announces a journal sui generis, that

restates, rather than relegates, his own pessimism. Its programme is in clear opposition to the social

and progressive concerns of the Antologia, and in line with the sardonic, if not derisory tone of

previous publications (the Preambolo alle annotazioni and some of the Operette). Significantly,

Leopardi’s project of the Spettatore fiorentino is introduced through a series of negations that carve

a void around the contents of the journal, and the professional profile of its editors:

non sono letterati, […] Non sono filosofi; non conoscono […] nessuna scienza; non amano la politica,

nè la statistica, nè l’economia pubblica o privata. Come essi non sono nulla, così è molto difficile a

definire che cosa debba essere il loro Giornale. Essi medesimi non lo sanno […] Non si trova altro che

idee negative: Giornale non letterario, non filosofico, non politico, non istorico, non di mode, non

d’arti e mestieri, non d’invenzioni e scoperte […] un’idea positiva, e una parola che dica tutto, non

viene. […] Se in italiano si avesse una parola che significasse quello che in francese di direbbe le

flâneur, quella parola appunto sarebbe stata il titolo sospirato; perchè […] il mestiere de’ futuri

compilatori del nostro Giornale, è quello che si esprime col detto vocabolo francese (PP. ii:1011).3

Elsewhere, in the Zibaldone, Leopardi had alluded to the insight and the “colpo d’occhio” that are

the distinguishing skills of the true poet-philosopher allowing, him to grasp in an epiphanic instant

the sense and meaning of the whole.4 Yet these skills did not lead in his opinion to “un’idea

positiva, e una parola che dica tutto”, an all-encompassing constructive idea. Rather they define the

capacity of grasping a general and overarching truth that may be, but is more likely not to be,

flattering for man. The following Zibaldone passage seems to me to redefine the distinctly

Leopardian notion of the ‘all encompassing idea’ in polemic with the type of scholars (literati,

philosophers, scientists, politicians, and economists) he ironically refers to in the preamble of the

Spettatore fiorentino, and to whom he opposes the figure of the flâneur:

d’un sol colpo d’occhio discernendo e mirando una moltitudine di oggetti, […] egli [poeta, filosofo,

uomo d’immaginativa e di sentimento] è in grado di scorger con essi i loro rapporti scambievoli, e

per la novità di quella moltitudine di oggetti tutti insieme rappresentantisegli, egli è attirato e a

considerare, benchè rapidam., i detti oggetti meglio che per l’innanzi non avea fatto, e ch’egli non

suole; e a voler guardare e notare i detti rapporti. Ond’è ch’egli ed abbia in quel momento una

straordinaria facoltà di generalizzare […], e ch’egli l'adoperi; e adoperandola scuopra di quelle

verità generali e perciò veramente grandi e importanti, che indarno fuor di quel punto e di quella